The lost blueprint: Whitey Herzog and the Cardinals dynasty
Imagine your favorite baseball team decided to eschew both home run hitters and strikeout pitchers. There would probably be some kind of fan revolt, since dingers and punchouts are nearly synonymous with offense and defense in the modern game. It’s a near-universal assumption that if a team wants to win it all, they have to possess power at the plate or power on the mound, and preferably both.
There was, however, a relatively recent mini-dynasty that won league championships without either home run hitters or strikeout pitchers. Three times in the last 30 years, a National League team was below league average in home runs and strikeout rate and went to the World Series. Those three teams were the St. Louis Cardinals of 1982, 1985 and 1987.
How did they do it? And why haven’t other teams successfully copied the formula?
Led by field manager Whitey Herzog, who also served as general manager for a brief time, those mid-1980s Cardinals are probably best known for their overall team speed, exemplified by Vince Coleman, the leadoff hitter who cracked 100 steals for three straight seasons and led the league in steals the first six years of his career.
But Coleman wasn’t the only one. Just about everyone on the team could run. Year in and year out, five or six starters would finish with double-digit steals totals and in 1985 alone the Cardinals stole 314 bases. In contrast, the 2010 Tampa Bay Rays led the league last season with 174.
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Those dizzying stolen base numbers, though, obscured the fact that Herzog had gathered a collection of solid hitters who, as a group, excelled at getting on base. While it might make for a more exciting narrative to say their aggressive running rattled pitchers and catchers once they got on base, leading to more hits, the fact is the Cardinals’ fortunes during that period were more closely tied to their ability to draw walks and lead the league in on-base percentage.
In 1982, 1985 and 1987, St. Louis finished second, first and first in walks in the NL, and were first in on-base percentage each year. In 1983, 1984 and 1986 – seasons in which they didn’t make the playoffs – they finished fifth, sixth and fifth in walks, and were middle of the pack in on-base percentage. When they weren’t walking, their running didn’t matter.
Where their running did matter, however, was on defense. Just as Sparky Anderson wouldn’t pencil somebody into the Big Red Machine’s lineup if he couldn’t hit, Herzog appeared to have had an aversion to men who couldn’t field. It’s no coincidence that the three mainstays in the lineup from 1982 to 1987 were up-the-middle defenders who could cover a lot of ground: shortstop Ozzie Smith, second baseman Tom Herr and center fielder Willie McGee.
The rest of the lineup followed suit. For a couple years, Ken Oberkfell, who had also played a lot of middle infield, played third base. Then Terry Pendleton took over, and he proved to be a Gold Glove-caliber fielder.
At first base, the Cardinals started the decade with Keith Hernandez, one of the better defensive first basemen of the past three decades and a very good hitter. But after trading him, they conceded defense at the position in order to get Jack Clark’s bat into the lineup.
Interestingly, it appeared they acquired Clark partly as a response to the age-related decline of catcher Darrell Porter, who had been a middle-of-the-order presence for the Cardinals’ 1982 championship team. With Clark in the lineup, Herzog took one season to transition Porter out of the starter’s role and in 1986 and 1987, defensive-oriented catchers Mike LaValliere and Tony Pena were the primary backstops.
But the biggest difference between the Cardinals’ defense and every other team’s may have been in the outfield. Instead of lumbering sluggers, the corners were often manned by men with more range than a lot of center fielders. Coleman, Andy Van Slyke and Lonnie Smith all played alongside McGee, which meant that more liners into the gaps got cut off and more fly balls were tracked down for outs.
Thus, the Cardinals regularly had seven above-average defenders in the field and their pitchers reaped the rewards. Every year from 1982 to 1987, St. Louis finished in the NL’s bottom three in strikeouts per nine innings. However, in only one of those seasons were they below-average in runs allowed per game.
Put it all together and the statistical record implies the Cardinals pitchers had no fear of pitching to contact, trusting that their superb defense would convert batted balls into outs. But though the statistics are telling, there’s no substitute for seeing that defense in action.
In footage of Game 1 of the 1987 National League Championship Series, a game in St. Louis between the Cardinals and the San Francisco Giants, the top of the fifth inning perfectly exemplifies how the Cardinals’ defense covered their pitchers’ deficiencies and won them ballgames.
Throughout the game, starting pitcher Greg Mathews certainly tried to strike batters out, and he would end up with seven strikeouts, but it’s not hard to conclude that he benefited immensely from the elite defense behind him.
Mathews had buckled a bit in the top of the fourth, giving up a home run and a single, and the fifth inning started off poorly, too. Weak-hitting shortstop Jose Uribe led off with a frozen rope into left-center field. The center fielder, McGee, had been shading Uribe to right-center, but he raced across the outfield and made a backhand stab at the ball to catch it on a short hop, some 350 feet from home plate, before it could skitter across Busch Stadium’s concrete-hard artificial turf all the way to the wall. In just a moment, he gathered himself and unleashed a perfectly accurate one-hop throw to Herr covering second base, holding Uribe to a single.
What’s most striking about the play is McGee’s reaction time. On the television broadcast, the view switches to a shot from behind home plate while the line drive is still over the infield, and in that shot, McGee is already sprinting to cut it off. Vin Scully and Joe Garagiola, in the booth for NBC, both marvel at McGee’s bases-saving play as the crowd applauds.
Later in the same inning, Smith made a pair of defensive plays robbing both Robby Thompson and Kevin Mitchell of imminent singles.
McGee’s play was a dramatic run-saver that everyone watching would notice, but both of Smith’s plays to first could have resulted in hits for the Giants, as well. That the Cards had perhaps the greatest defensive shortstop of all time on their side may have saved them a run, which may have been lost on fans because he made those plays look so easy.
In today’s game, there is no Ozzie Smith, but could a Major League organization follow the principles of those Cardinals teams? Would it be worthwhile to try to build a team the same way?
If we were to build a team today with players that are the equivalent of, say, the 1985 Cardinals, the starting lineup would have to be made up of a single slugger at first base, and then seven high-end defenders with good on-base percentages at every other position, all in the primes of their careers or the start of their primes. Aside from the first baseman, a couple guys could have moderate home run power, but none of them would be considered cleanup hitters on just about any other team. The bullpen would be constructed traditionally, with power arms, but the starters would all be low-strikeout men, with relatively low walk rates, too.
So, the catcher might be Francisco Cervelli, the outfield might be Brett Gardner, Shane Victorino and Cameron Maybin, and the infield might be Placido Polanco, Alexei Ramirez, Alberto Callaspo and Prince Fielder. The pitching staff could be made up of guys like Kyle Lohse, Mike Pelfrey, Paul Maholm, Bronson Arroyo and Tim Stauffer.
If that team stayed healthy, they could be among the best in baseball, simply because their defense would be a nightly work of art, and their offense would be solid top-to-bottom, too. Best of all, according to Cot’s Baseball Contracts, the starting lineup would cost well under $40 million this season, and even with excessively expensive starting pitchers, and a little splurging on a bullpen and bench, the total player payroll could come in under $75 million, below the median Major League payroll.
So, why haven’t other teams gone down this path? Part of it probably has to do with how difficult it is to find those types of players in the first place. The ones listed above have been in the Major Leagues long enough that consensus has built about their various abilities. There is no such consensus about minor league players; identifying hitters who will be successful at the highest level is hard enough, and identifying fantastic defenders is even harder, given the paucity of data describing minor league fielders.
The other part of it probably has to do with the unpredictability of defense. Baseball people have long surmised that defensive performance is more inconsistent from year to year than offensive performance, and the defensive statistics that have become widely used over the past few years seem to back up that intuition. So it follows that even the most talented defenders won’t necessarily repeat their production from year to year, even if they remain truly talented. A team made up of players whose values are mostly tied up in defense, therefore, will have an exceptionally wide range of expected performance, just as the mid-1980s Cardinals yo-yoed from first place to under .500 and then back to first.
All that said, the primary lesson remains: home runs and strikeouts aren’t the only ways to score and prevent runs, and the 1980s Cardinals proved championship teams could be built around subtler skills that might still be unappreciated.
In addition to his contributions to The Good Point David Arnott contributes regularly to the The Sporting News.
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